Four short links: 16 Apr 2009

China, databases, storage, and git:

1. China's Complicated Internet Culture (Ethan Zuckerman) -- summary of Rebecca McKinnon's talk at the Berkman Internet Center. Democracy is complex and hard to transition to, online democracy doubly so. Rebecca questions the widespread but unjustified belief that the Great Firewall of China is all that separates Chinese citizens from the empowered liberty of the West, and lays out the tangled state of affairs in China's political Internet. Despite the rise of web video, “no one has managed to organized an opposition party on the web,” Rebecca points out. “There’s no Lech Walenza, no religious movement - Falun Gong has been squished pretty thoroughly.” (via cshirky's delicious stream)
2. Drop ACID and Think About Data -- Bob Ippolito's talk from PyCon about the things you can do easily when you foresake the promises of ACID. More in the ongoing reinvention of databases for the needs of modern web systems. (via cesther's Twitter stream)
3. The Pogoplug -- The Pogoplug connects your external hard drive to the Internet so you can easily share and access your files from anywhere. We're accumulating terabytes of storage at home, where it's very useful to all the computers in the home. This offers an easy way for non-technical civilians to make these drives useful outside the home as well. There are many possibilities for Interesting Things in the massive storage we're accumulating. (via joshua's delicious stream)
4. Gitorious -- open source (AGPLv3) clone of github. (via edd's delicious stream)

PhoneGap, the Mobile Platform Democratizer

Phonegap is an opensource development framework for mobile platforms. It allows developers to build native apps in HTML and JavaScript. Currently PhoneGap works for the iPhone and Android, but Blackberry and other OSs are on the way. You can get PhoneGap from Github or Google Code.

There are eighteen iPhone apps listed on the PhoneGap site. Though the apps are created with web technologies PhoneGap provides access to the phone's client APIs and run in Objective-C. I tested both Roadtrippr and the fun Blok-Buster Lite. As promised the apps are able to use my phone's location, accelerometer and multi-touch controls. Though the functionality was there both apps seemed a bit flat. This could have been related to their design, but I suspect that it is a PhoneGap issue.

Nitobi, the Vancouver-based company behind Phonegap, intends to make money via future services. Developers will be able to upload their HTML and JavaScript and get back a URL for a tested, compiled app for each platform. Nitobi won the People's Choice award last week at the Web 2.0 Expo SF during our Launchpad event where they launched a desktop emulator for their supported patforms. Both Techcrunch and ReadWriteWeb covered the event.

PhoneGap still has a ways to go before it is the one framework to rule them all. Their Roadmap is below and they would be thrilled if any of you wanted to assist them. In the feature-platform matrix below green means done, yellow means in-progress and red means not currently possible (they'll have to update the redblock in the Copy/Paste column of the iPhone for when 3.0 comes out).

Though the Palm Pre isn't listed it is definitely on Nitobi's mind, but don't expect them to support regular mobiles or even earlier smart phones. Only the latest generation of smartphones will be targeted.

There's a gold-rush happening right now in mobile marketplaces. However not everyone is able to participate and not all platforms are receiving equal attention. PhoneGap has the potential to be a great democratizer. It lowers the bar for developers to create powerful applications out of very familiar web technologies. It also enables sites to support versions of their apps for mobile platforms other than the iPhone. If you don't have an iPhone (or even if you do) you should be cheering this project along.

Four short links: 2 Apr 2009

Predictions, PDF, source code control, and recommendation engines:

1. Wrong Tomorrow -- track pundits predictions and see how accurate they really are. From the ever-awesome Maciej Ceglowski.
2. PDFMiner -- Unlike other PDF-related tools, it allows to obtain the exact location of texts in a page, as well as other layout information such as font size or font name, which could be useful for analyzing the document. It also infers text running within a page by using clustering technique. Entirely written in Python.
3. Migrating from svn to a Distributed VCS -- to decide which distributed VCS to use, Brett Cannon gathered Python use cases and then showed how they'd be done with different dvcses. The result is a very useful comparison document for svn, bzr, git, and hg.
4. Online Monoculture and the End of the Niche -- interesting post summarising and explaining research into recommendation engines, drawing the conclusion that although Internet World recommendation engines show everybody lots of new stuff, we're all seeing the same new stuff and the end result is less the "riches of niches" Long Tail fantasy and more a monoculture.

Four short links: 13 Mar 2009

Museums, Labs, Businesses, and Hash--all in today's four short links:

1. Shelley Bernstein Talks About the Brooklyn Museum at the National Library of New Zealand (Paul Reynolds) -- I've written about Shelley's work before. Brooklyn [Museum] is not about using social media as just another marketing and visitor experience tool-set. Rather, as Bernstein said last night, Brooklyn Museum itself is now a social network - that is its job - to be a center for the community to have a conversation. Wonderful to see New Zealand continuing to learn from the best.
2. Google Labs India -- interesting projects, including Digital Noticeboard and SMS Channels (Google ID required to view the latter). Interesting to see the projects worked on in different countries. The latter is like Mozes.
3. Privacy and Free Speech, It's Good for Business (PDF!) -- Northern California ACLU have produced a book aimed at businesses that frames free speech issues as a business good: The practical tips and real-life business case studies in this Guide will help you to avoid having millions read about your privacy and free speech mistakes later. The advice is straightforward and specific, not of the vague and "don't be evil" variety. Give users an opportunity to defend their anonymity. Provide notice, within no more than seven days of receipt of a subpoena, to each user whose personal information is sought, and inform the user of her right to file a motion to quash (fight) the subpoena. Give the user at least thirty days from the time notice is received to file a motion to quash the subpoena. (via BoingBoing)
4. pHash, The Open Source Perceptual Hash Library -- a perceptual hash is a signature for a file, built in a way that two files that represent similar things (e.g., two photographs of the same poster). (via Joshua's delicious stream)

Four short links: 9 Mar 2009

Hardware, open source, and AI today:

1. Geek Tour China 2009 -- how did I miss this? Bunnie Huang has led a tour of China manufacturing for hardware hacking geeks. Read the blog posts from participants: here, here, here, here, and here. Just go ahead and add these bloggers to your feed reader: sweet sweet candy they post. My favourite: American Shanzai, asking where are the USA hackers like the Chinese who make working phones out of packets of cigarettes? But read the posts for giant single-digit LED clocks, markets of components from torn-down phones, and 280km of velcro/day machines.
2. Open Source Hardware Central Bank -- an interesting idea to fund the manufacture of larger runs than would be possible with self-funding, so as to achieve modest economies of scale. "Looking at Open Source Software, it's a thriving ecosystems of communities, projects, and contributors. There are a few companies, but they mostly offer "paid-for" services like consulting, tech support, or custom code/build-to-order functionality. I'd like the same for Open Source Hardware. I'd like the money problem to go away for small contributors like me and others. And I'd like to help guys like Chris and Mike and Mark and David and Jake build more cool stuff because it's fun."
3. Wolfram Alpha -- everyone is skeptical because it smells like AI windmill tilting mixed with "my pet algorithms are the keys to the secrets of the universe!", but it'll be interesting to see what it looks like when it launches in May. "But what about all the actual knowledge that we as humans have accumulated? [...] armed with Mathematica and NKS I realized there’s another way: explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable. [...] I wasn’t at all sure it was going to work. But I’m happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we’re actually managing to make it work. Pulling all of this together to create a true computational knowledge engine is a very difficult task."
4. Open Source, Open Standards, and Reuse: Government Action Plan -- "So we consider that the time is now right to build on our record of fairness and achievement and to take further positive action to ensure that Open Source products are fully and fairly considered throughout government IT; to ensure that we specify our requirements and publish our data in terms of Open Standards; and that we seek the same degree of flexibility in our commercial relationships with proprietary software suppliers as are inherent in the open source world." Great news from the UK!

Vivek Kundra: Federal CIO in His Own Words

The following article contains several audio excerpts and transcripts from Vivek Kundra's first conference call as the newly appointed Federal CIO. After weeks of speculation it was formally announced today that President Obama has appointed Kundra, who had previously been serving as the CTO for Washington D.C.. In his previous position, Kundra pushed the boundaries of Information Technology and set the standard for transparency and accountability adopting Google Apps as a collaboration platform, video taping vendor interactions, and instituting a rigorous regime of metrics and accountability for government contracts.

In the following audio excerpts you'll hear about Kundra's plans to help push Federal IT towards more transparency and accountability. You'll also get a sense that Kundra, through his interaction with the CIO council is going to start unifying the federal government's approach to procurement and planning. In one of Kundra's answers, he suggests that President Obama will be announcing another appointment for a CTO position. This conference call was recorded on Thursday morning, shortly after the Whitehouse published a press release naming Kundra as the newly appointed Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO).

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Four short links: 3 Mar 2009

The problems of Creative Commons around the world, ebook futures, open source biomed research, and a new open source conference:

1. The Case For and Against Creative Commons -- skip straight to page two, where the article talks about the places around the world where CC isn't working. "More exactly, they fear that if you try to convert artists to CC who had never thought of copyrighting their works before, they may simply fall in love with the concept of making money through full copyright and stick to it." (via Paul Reynolds on a mailing list)
2. Are We Having The Wrong Conversation About eBook Pricing? -- "The first TV shows were basically radio programs on the television — until someone realized that TV was a whole new medium. Ebooks should not just be print books delivered electronically. We need to take advantage of the medium and create something dynamic to enhance the experience. I want links and behind the scenes extras and narration and videos and conversation...". Yes, but radio shows still persist even though they're delivered through the Internet. Old formats don't have to die in the face of new media, the question is what's best for a particular purpose. I read books on my iPhone as I go to sleep at night ... I don't want hypermedia linked videos and a backchannel. I don't want the future of ebooks to be 1990s Shockwave CD-ROM "interactives". (via Andrew Savikas' delicious feed)
3. Sage -- "a new, not-for-profit medical research organization established in 2009 to revolutionize how researchers approach the complexity of human biological information and the treatment of disease. Sage’s objectives are: to build and support an open access platform and databases for building innovative new dynamic disease models; to interconnect scientists as contributors to evolving, integrated networks of biological data." Apparently they'll be seeded with a pile of high-resolution very expensive data from Merck. (via BoingBoing)
4. Open Source Bridge -- open source conference in Portland, OR, started to fill the void when OSCON moved to San Jose. Very open source: they show you all the proposals, and you can even subscribe to a feed of the proposals as they come in. Many look good, though I'm pretty sure that 1993 called and wants its Tcl back. This conference might be just the excuse I need to visit Portland.

Karmic Koalas Love Eucalyptus

Guest blogger Simon Wardley, a geneticist with a love of mathematics and a fascination for economics, is the Software Services Manager for Canonical, helping define future cloud computing strategies for Ubuntu. Simon is a passionate advocate and researcher in the fields of open source, commoditization, innovation, and cybernetics.

Mark Shuttleworth recently announced that the release of Ubuntu 9.10 will be code-named Karmic Koala. Whilst many of the developments around Ubuntu 9.10 are focused on the desktop, a significant effort is being made on the server release to bring Ubuntu into the cloud computing space. The cloud effort begins with 9.04 and the launch of a technology preview of Eucalyptus, an open sourced system for creating Amazon EC2-like clouds, on Ubuntu.

I thought I'd discuss some of the reasoning behind Ubuntu's Cloud Computing strategy. Rather than just give a definition of cloud computing, I'll start with a closer look at its underlying causes.

The computing stack is comprised of many layers, from the applications we write, to the platforms we develop in and the infrastructure we build upon. Some activities at various layers of this stack have become so ubiquitous and well defined that they are now suitable for service provision through volume operations. This has led to the growth of the 'as a Service' industries, with providers like Amazon EC2 and Force.com.

Information Technology's shift from a product to a service-based economy brings with it both advantage and disruption. On the one hand, the shift offers numerous benefits including economies of scale (through volume operations), focus on core activities (outsourcing), acceleration in innovation (componentisation), and pay per use (utility charging). On the other hand, many concerns remain, some relating to the transitional nature of this shift (management, security and trust), while others pertain to the general outsourcing of any common activity (second sourcing options, competitive pricing pressures and lock-in). These concerns create significant adoption barriers for the cloud.

At Canonical, the company that sponsors and supports Ubuntu, we intend to provide our users with the ability to build their own clouds whilst promoting standards for the cloud computing space. We want to encourage the formation of competitive marketplaces for cloud services with users having choice, freedom, and portability between providers. In a nutshell, and with all due apologies to Isaac Asimov, our aim is to enable our users with 'Three Rules Happy' cloud computing. That is to say:

• Rule 1: I want to run the service on my own infrastructure.


• Rule 2: I want to easily migrate the service from my infrastructure to a cloud provider and vice versa with a few clicks of a button.


• Rule 3: I want to easily migrate the service from one cloud provider to another with a few clicks of a button.

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O'Reilly Labs: RDF For All of Our Books, Plus Bookworm Ebook Reader

There's more details on the Labs blog, but timed with our Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, we've opened up RDF metadata for all of our books, and have also brought the open source Bookworm ebook reader into O'Reilly Labs. It's a great way to read any of our ebooks (more than 400 are now available as ebook bundles from oreilly.com) online and from a mobile phone:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="https://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
  <om:Product xmlns:om="https://purl.oreilly.com/ns/meta/" 
              rdf:about="urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:product:9780596521677.BOOK" 
              xmlns:dc="https://purl.org/dc/terms/"
              xml:lang="en">
    <dc:isFormatOf rdf:resource="urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:product:955988693.IP"/>
    <dc:issued>2008-08-13</dc:issued>
    <dc:creator>
      <rdf:Seq rdf:ID="creator">
        <rdf:li rdf:resource="urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:agent:pdb:350"/>
      </rdf:Seq>
    </dc:creator>
    <dc:rightsHolder>David Pogue</dc:rightsHolder>
    <dc:description>The new iPhone 3G is here, and bestselling author David Pogue 
      is back with a thoroughly updated edition of &lt;em&gt;iPhone: The Missing 
      Manual&lt;/em&gt;. With its faster downloads, touch-screen iPod, and best-ever 
      mobile Web browser, the new affordable iPhone is packed with possibilities.
      But without an objective guide like this one, you'll never unlock all it can
      do for you. Each custom designed page helps you accomplish specific tasks for
      everything from web browsing, to new apps, to watching videos.</dc:description>
    <dc:extent>376 pages</dc:extent>
    <dc:type rdf:resource="https://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/PhysicalObject"/>
    <dc:format>6 x 9 in</dc:format>
...

The URLs are structured by ISBN13. Once you have the ISBN13 for an O'Reilly book, you can get the full metadata via HTTP request to:

https://opmi.labs.oreilly.com/product/ISBN13

To get you started, here's direct links to the public RDF for our current top-5 bestsellers:

• Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual
• iPhone: The Missing Manual, 2e
• iPod: The Missing Manual, 7e
• Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML
• Photoshop Elements 7: The Missing Manual

You can also follow @oreillylabs on twitter.

Open Source NG Databases (mailing list summary)

There are plenty of new databases coming out, aiming to tackle the massively scalable domain that Google's BigTable pioneered. On the Radar mailing list, Jesse pointed out Cassandra (Facebook's offering) and Mike Loukides countered with Hypertable, asking "We're sort of being overrun with BigTable-style databases; I wonder what's going to win?". (Artur observed, "Cassandra is less like BigTable and more like a distributed column store with autocreating and searching in column namespace, but lacks a lot of indexing needed for BigTable.")

Jesse replied it'd be the one that's easiest for developers to use quickly, and I expanded that to:

• language and platform integration (e.g., Ruby, Rails, Django) so it can be used in the language you use to get stuff done
• higher abstractions available (as ActiveRecord is to databases, the higher abstraction would be to BigTable) to make it map closer to the problems you have, and to make you more productive with it (nobody disputes that machine code is very powerful but nobody wants to be debugging race conditions via hex dumps)
• straightforward deployment (either buy time on an S3-like cloud, or it's no more hassle than MySQL to deploy)
• a killer app for PR purposes

Mike queried my integrations and abstractions items, though, observing that CouchDB has only an HTTP REST interface—you can write to it in bash using curl if you want. Jesse said that's why they're using it for Chef. I was the parade-rainer, though:

Doesn't that just mean that it's equally inconvenient for many languages? I mean, nobody slaps HTTP into their code as an API. Surely they write an own-language wrapper for the REST stuff so they're not constantly arsing around with encoding parameters, decoding responses, all that business that's not the business you're in.

Artur rebutted with:

use LWP qw(get);
use Whatever::JSON;
$data = json_parse(get("https://couchdb/query"));

Simpler than DBI for sure.

I'm curious: do you use these new databases? What do you like about the one you use? What don't you like? What do you think will be necessary for one to break out into the mainstream?

Four short links: 30 Jan 2009

Two serious links and two fun today, thanks to Waxy and BoingBoing:

1. EveryBlock Business Model Brainstorming -- Adrian Holovaty's project was funded by a Knight Foundation grant that's about to run out. The software will be open sourced but he's inviting suggestions of business models that would enable the project team to continue working on it full-time. Having used and created open source to show newspaper companies how to do journalism online, will he now work on an open source way for them to make money?
2. Infrastructure for Modern Web Sites -- Leonard Lin lays out what's required in systems and platforms for modern web sites. Perl succeeded in part because its data types were the things you had to deal with (files, text, sockets). Will the next gen of tools (the 'Rails killer' if you will) offer users, taggable objects, social objects, etc. as primitives?
3. Academic Earth -- takes open courseware from different universities and integrates them into a coherent UI. Transcripts. Slurp.
4. Love2D -- a Lua-based 2D game engine. I'm looking at it to see whether it works for me as the next step for 9 year-old kids interesting in programming games in my computer club.

Four short links: 29 Jan 2009

Luck, craft, coding, and strategy today on Four Short Links:

1. Because -- After a NZ big-money low-success e-tailer closed, there was widespread "ha! about time!" in the blogosphere. This post, by one of New Zealand's most successful web entrepreneurs, is a fantastically humble reality check. "Build it and they won’t necessarily come, no matter how good you think it is and how much you try and tell them about it. Looking at a high profile failure, and thinking that you just need to do to the opposite to be successful can be quite misleading."
2. Ira Glass's Manifesto -- the man behind This American Life talks about the art and craft of creating great radio stories. I learned a lot from reading it, and not just about radio. "I'm not against manipulating feelings. The whole job is about manipulating feelings. If you don't get in front of that and embrace it with a big bear hug, you're not doing your job as a radio producer. You just don't want to be all corny about it." It's the great lesson I'm still learning from Sara Winge at O'Reilly, that humans are built of emotions and stories and if we want to reach a human then we must speak with emotions and stories.
3. Switching from scripting languages to Objective C and iPhone: useful libraries -- Matt Biddulph notes some libraries that made his first Objective C programming easier.
4. Three Freemium Strategies -- I've been looking for an excuse to link to this blog, Startup Lessons Learned. It's well-written and informative. "Strategy is all about what you're not going to do; for a freemium business, it's about which users you're willing to turn away. Knowing which model you're in can make these decisions a little less excruciating."

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